I bring this up because today I went and looked at my dissertation draft, currently clocking in at 120 pages, and found a note I had written there, a note that was an idea for a book. Actually, it was just an idea for a title. But the title is pretty self-suggesting.When I write a book on pedagogy (not that’s a when, not an if), I think I’m going to call it “Teachnology: pedagogy in an age of rapid technological change” or something like that. At the very least, I’m going to use that term (Teachnology). It’s an important idea, I think.

The problem is that technology tends to be adapted to teaching very slowly. And usually, when it’s first adopted, it ends up being used poorly. When people first used Second Life to teach, they made a virtual classroom and held a lecture. How is that new and different? It may be slightly advantageous for an online class, but essentially it’s just using a new technology to do something that they used to do anyway.

The same can be said about powerpoint. When I was an undergrad and people first started using it, Power Point was just a way of doing overhead slides without constantly having to switch the clear plastic sheets. It took years before people started to really see how Power Point can do NEW things, and can help teaching by doing those new things.

As new technology surfaces, we as teachers need to learn how to use it to do NEW things, not just to do the same old stuff we’ve always done with new bells and whistles.

Hopefully, I’ll get an opportunity to do that at a nice school next year. And then, maybe, I’ll start writing books about pedagogy. Aside from Teachnology, there’s always “Pedagogy of Deception: the use of misdirection in teaching.”

I think that would sell.

So, you’re ready to get started. Great. Let me put a few things out there for you to keep in the back of your mind:

1. Calm down. Seriously. I know it feels like what you have in front of you is the most important thing you’ve ever done and the most important thing you’ll ever do. You probably think you have to write a book, or the seminal piece in whatever field. You’re about to become an expert, and you don’t see how you’re going to do that. Chill out. Take a breath. You already are an expert. You wouldn’t be at this point if you weren’t. Your adviser has made sure of that. And what you’re writing isn’t the be-all end-all. It’s just another paper. A longer, more in depth one, but still just a paper. This isn’t a book. Maybe, after you finish, defend, and get a job, you’ll take some of it and make a book, but this isn’t it.

2. Seriously, you’re an expert. I know you feel like you’re not. You feel like there’s so much out there you don’t know, so much you haven’t read. It’s still right there in your mind, all those memories of times you had conversations with people, colleagues or professors, and they would name some author you’d never heard of. It made you feel like you didn’t know anything, like you didn’t have the research you needed. But think about it. Really think. In those most recent memories, how often have you named an author other people don’t know? How often have you known the author they’re talking about? You’re an expert. I promise.

3. Don’t worry about how many sources you have. I know you’re panicking. You looked at a book and found that in 300 pages, there were 350 sources. If you’re going to write 200 pages, that means you need 233.3333. Well, first off, stop doing that kind of math. It’s not precise. There isn’t a formula. Second, that’s a book. You’re not writing a book (see number 1). And third, you’ve probably got more sources than you think. Back when I was at 90 pages, I had 64 sources, and that wasn’t counting attributing all the pictures I used to illustrate points.

4. Write what you want to read. If you’re not a qualitative researcher, don’t do that. Write the kind of work you can feel confident about, the kind you can enjoy, and the kind that you would want to see added to the world. The rest will come. I promise. You won’t be able to write without adding in quotes. You’ll say something, and then you’ll realize that it should be supported. And, more importantly, you’ll know what to support it with. That’s because you’re an expert. See?
5. Pick an audience. I know we talk about audience a lot, and that’s because audience is important. Know who’s going to read your work. But I don’t mean that in the literal sense. Think who you want to read it. Your intended audience. Know who that is, and you’ll know what you need to explain and what you don’t. You’ll know what people bring with them when they read it, and you’ll know what lingo you have to define for them.

6. Your prospectus was just a guideline. All the stuff you said you were going to write may feel like some kind of binding, but it isn’t. Even if you outlined chapter by chapter, you don’t have to stick with it. That was just to show your committee where you were at the time, where you thought you were going. As you get deeper and deeper into the project, it’s okay that things started to change. That’s normal. Check in with your adviser and make sure you’re not too far off track. Mainly, though, go where the research takes you. Write what works for you.

7. Make sure your adviser is a lion. The right adviser will do more than just give you the advice above. The right adviser will also fight on your behalf if anyone on your committee disagrees. They’ll assure the other members that you did what they wanted, and they’ll remind the other members that your adviser’s opinion is the one that matters most.

There we go. That’s the best advice I can think of right now.

Of course, I didn’t know that at first. It wasn’t until a wonderful professor, Marjorie Hass, gave me an analogy of how to really DO philosophy that I found out what I liked about it so much. As an aside, I owe Marjorie a lot; if she hadn’t been sitting at the next table when I registered for my first semester in college, overheard me asking for alternatives to math classes, and spoken up, suggesting I take Critical Thinking (with her), I probably never would have. And had she not given me a book of logic puzzles and then suggested that I take Formal Logic (also with her), I probably wouldn’t have given philosophy a second thought. She started me on a very strange road, and I owe her a lot for that.

But that’s besides the point. I want to talk about one thing she said to me. She said that I need to think of papers, and philosophy in general, as being a pool. I can skim the surface and get some good things, but I can also dive deeper, and get more. And the deeper I dive, the more questions I ask, the more I’ll get out of it.

That’s stuck with me ever since. When I write about a subject, I don’t want to just accept the general thoughts about it. I want to ask the questions that go deeper, examine the cases out on the fringe, and peel back the layers. Essentially, I like to dive down as deep as I can, peeling an onion as I go (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?).

When I wrote my master’s thesis for Philosophy, I examined what personal identity really was. What do I mean when I say I am me? I looked at the different possible explanations for what makes me ME (body? no. Brain? no. Closest continuer? no. Psychological continuity? Only X and Y? there we go.). When I wrote my master’s thesis for English, I examined how we do peer response, what’s wrong with it, and how to improve it (more often? no. more focused? no. throw it away? no. Put the impetus on the students and treat it like usability testing? there we go.)

So now, I’m writing my dissertation. I want to know how we use icons and avatars to create our online identities. But I don’t just want to see what we have done, or what we do. I want to know what we might someday (soon) do. I want to ask those deeper questions, find out what the icon REALLY says, what these things ACTUALLY do, and whether or not everything everyone has said about them is wrong… or at least, if they didn’t go deep enough.

So I’m diving in. Deeper and deeper, following the lines of thought, weighted down by the research, and peeling myself an onion.

A wolf comes across a rabbit typing away with abandon. The wolf, curious, asks the rabbit what it is typing. “My dissertation,” the rabbit says. “It’s about how rabbits kill wolves.”

“Rabbits don’t kill wolves,” the wolf says. “Wolves eat rabbits.”

“No, rabbits kill wolves. Come in to my den, I’ll show you.”

So they go into the den, the wolf sure he’s about to have a very easy meal.

Inside the den, a lion waits. He kills the wolf and starts eating him. While he’s eating, the rabbit goes back outside and continues work on the dissertation.

The moral of the story: it doesn’t matter what your dissertation is about; all that matters is who your adviser is.

I never quite got the joke, I don’t think. I mean, I thought it was funny, but a little bit ridiculous (even putting aside the talking animals or the lion in a rabbit’s den). How could an adviser have THAT much influence, make THAT much of a difference?

Well, I recently changed advisers. And now I understand.

My old adviser is a nice guy. He was very helpful when he could be, but we just didn’t fit together. Part of it was personality, I think, but most of it was that we had different goals. When he told me that I could “Teach three or four classes a semester, and go home every day and just be done, or grade papers,” I thought that sounded great. He thought it sounded like hell. He wants to be at a research university (and he is), but doesn’t know how to handle someone who wants to be at a teaching school (like me). So we parted, and on good terms.

My new adviser is awesome. Aside from understanding the desire to be at a teaching college, and understanding that publication is good, but not my end-all goal, he has become my lion. He actually said to me “the best approach to your project is whichever one is easiest for you to write.” Where my old adviser told me I should consider a sixth year in the program, because I wouldn’t be ready to go on the job market, my new adviser said “why not just finish this year?” and “The jobs you want won’t even be posted until January. Worry about things then. For now, just write.”

So now, instead of trying to fit into a mold of research and methodology that I don’t feel comfortable in, that I felt would be on a certain level a disingenuous representation of who I am, I can instead focus on the ideas of the project, the parts that matter (to me). I can investigate questions in depth, looking for the core of what they are asking, rather than presenting a bunch of qualitative research to answer one or two somewhat broad questions.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s nothing wrong with qualitative research. It’s very important, vital to progress. But it’s not for me. I want to do the higher order thinking. I want to consider an issue from as many angles as possible. I want to lay the groundwork so that someone can take the suggestions or arguments that I made and develop good research questions. I want to lay the groundwork that other people use to do qualitative research. At the end of the day, who’s going to be more famous in the field? The person doing the qualitative research. They’re the ones that will have tangible results.

And I’m okay with that. I don’t want to be a famous research. I want to be a good teacher. And while I may still find a certain level of ‘fame’ (within the field), it’s not my goal. Just like someone who focuses on research may be a great teacher, it’s a nice bonus, but not the point of my job.

And now I have the hope, the belief, and the confidence that I can actually DO this. I can finish my dissertation. And why? Because I’ve got a lion in my den. Want to come see?

That’s the way it’s supposed to be. But that’s not how it always happens. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my life, is that ‘the way it’s supposed to be’ is almost always different from the way it is.I got my bachelor’s degree in 2002. Then I went into a PhD program that included a Master’s in the process. But the point of that was just to have 5 years and get both degrees at once. So I would, in theory, have been finished by 2007. Instead, I left the program in 2004, and was awarded an MA for my troubles.

Okay, so BA, then MA. Still on track. But then I decided that I wanted a degree that would help me get a job, that all important ‘final’ step (I mean, there’s still tenure and all that, but that comes later). So I decided to study rhetoric. Rhetoric is like philosophy, but with employment. But that meant getting an English degree. A second MA.

BA, MA, MA. Starting to sound like the beat of a song, but doable. So I did my coursework for the PhD, and got through that relatively unscathed (if you leave out the little nervous breakdown). Then I took my exams. I passed two, failed one. So I had to retake the third. Then would come the oral exams.

Only I didn’t do it that way. I started working on my prospectus between the re-taking of my third exam and the oral exams. The prospectus was a hell of a process, and though I managed to get through it, things outside of work got even harder (my cancer, death of my father, etc).

Only I haven’t, technically, gotten through it. My adviser likes the prospectus. He told me to keep working, to go ahead and work on the dissertation, while I waited for the prospectus meeting. No point sitting around doing nothing while waiting for the planets to align just right and get the four members of my committee in the same room at the same time.

So my prospectus isn’t ‘approved’ officially. That said, I’ve got about 30 pages of my dissertation finished. Not in a row, though. I have most of the first chapter (except for one large part in the middle), and a good portion of the second done.

I’m starting to worry that my prospectus meeting will be only a few weeks before my defense. That would be weird.

There’s also the possibility that I won’t be able to finish in time. My contract was only for 5 years, and that 5th one is coming up fast. I can apply for further aid, but it isn’t guaranteed.

Then again, I think I can pretty convincingly argue that this last year has had enough difficulty to explain why I didn’t make more progress, and even make the progress I did make more impressive. It’s hard to deny that someone had a hard year when they lose a parent and a testicle to cancer within 3 months of each other. Hard to expect someone to recover from both of those things quickly. And I don’t think I have. Not entirely. But I still kept teaching, and did a relatively good job of it. (Fall semester didn’t go so well, but that was right when my father died). I only cancelled 2 classes when I had cancer, so my commitment to teaching is pretty clear.

I hope I don’t have to make that argument. But if I do, I think I’ve got a lot on my side.

Some of them don’t. Some rules restrict us, blind us to possibilities, and prevent creativity. I see this all the time when teaching students to write. They have had the five paragraph essay format drilled into them so deeply that they can’t comprehend any other ways to write; they can’t even conceive that there ARE other ways. They know the rules of writing, and they have to follow them, even though it makes them hate writing papers. They know they are constrained, they know they’re in a cage, but since they can’t see the bars, they can’t escape.

I consider that to be a part of my job. I show them the bars, show them the door, and help them find other ways. In other words, I teach my students how to break the rules.

This way of looking at it really appeals to the rebel in me, but I’ve seen that this is really how I think. Circumventing rules is the way I work.

My prospectus won’t be approved until probably the end of May. If I’m unlucky, it may not even be approved until the beginning of the next academic year. By the rules, I should be waiting to work on my dissertation until the prospectus is approved. So I should be sitting around and maybe researching, hoping that eventually I’ll be able to move forward.

Fuck that.

I work on my dissertation all the time. So far, only on the first two chapters, where I introduce my argument and present my literature review, but when those are finished, I’ll move on. I’ll move on the same way I moved on to my prospectus before I was officially told my exams were passed.

But that’s not the only rule I’m breaking. I’m writing the dissertation with a certain level of narrative that I think is unusual, maybe even against the rules. But not against the rules as in breaking them. Against the rules as in circumventing them. I’ve seen some academic works where serious, difficult concepts were presented in story form. It’s nothing new; Plato did it, after all. But it seems that people generally are opposed to these things. So I break those rules.

I also don’t work like other people do. I don’t spend eight hours a day working on my dissertation. I focus on it when I can, but mostly I leave it to ruminate in the back of my head while I do other things. I don’t read book after book and rant and rave about how fantastic scholars are. Other people do this, but that’s not how I work. I work my own way, and trying to change that just makes me miserable.

It’s a lesson that was hard to learn, but one I had to teach myself, just as I teach my students: If I don’t like the way I’ve always been told things should be done, I have to find the bars of my cage and figure out a different way, a way that works for me.

And I’ve got 20 pages of a dissertation that support the idea that it DOES, in fact, work. For me.

But I’ve still been dragging my feet. I’ve been questioning the academic methods and railing against them. I wanted to say something new, not just rehash what others have said. I hated the idea that I had to quote so many people, that I had to write a thirty page literature review. I wanted MY words, not someone else’s.

It’s kind of childish, really. And I knew it was. I knew I was bitching for no good reason, and that while I wanted to be able to have my own words be the proof of my brilliance (or at least expertise), that wasn’t the real problem. That being said, I STILL didn’t want to do it.

At least, not until I taught my class about the use of quotations in argument. That’s when I had the epiphany. The one that made me want to slap myself.I was telling my students that quotes do not make the arguments. Quotes support the argument. I’ve said that for years, but I’m not sure it ever got through to anyone. Largely because I don’t think I ever put it the right way. I never told them that the real point of research, the real value of citation and quoting, is to establish YOUR credibility. It’s to prove that you know what you’re talking about. That you’ve considered the various points of view, that you’re a part of the conversation, and so what you are saying has strength. Has value. Your word MATTERS.

I mentally kicked myself even as I was saying it. That’s why we do literature reviews. It’s not bragging, and it’s not having other people make the arguments for us. The point of the literature review is to SHOW your readers that your opinion should hold weight. That you are part of the conversation and know what you’re talking about. And we put the literature review separate in the dissertation so that it can be all in one place. You can show that you have credibility, and then ride on that for the rest of the dissertation.

I imagine most of you are kind of confused right now, wondering what the big deal is. And there isn’t one. It’s an obvious thing, something I should have known (something I DID know), but that I was in denial about. It was a stupid thing to have to realize, but I had to. So what does that say about me?

…

Don’t answer that.

I still hate doing them, but at least now I have REASON to do a lit review.

The other day I handed in what I hope will be the last prospectus draft I will have to write. If it is accepted, then I’ll officially be dissertating. Which is pretty damned terrifying. But I think I can handle the work.

When I was in college, my father gave me some advice for writing a dissertation. He said that writing a two hundred page paper was really daunting, and liable to seem insurmountable. But writing ten twenty page papers, or five forty page papers, would not be nearly so difficult a task. That’s what chapters are, after all: individual papers on the same subject.

Given what I settled on (the rhetoric of online icons and avatars), I’m going to have to do some case study work; probably on a forum and on google+. Each of those will be a chapter, which means each of them will probably involve a whole lot of work on those sites, along with analysis and all that good stuff. But before I get there, there are other chapters.

For one, I need to introduce my project. I need to say why it’s important, what it’s intending to do, and where I think it’ll go. Essentially, I need to establish everything that is in my prospectus, but expand on it and make solid arguments to support as much as possible. If I can, I’d like to be able to structure the introduction as a derivation from first principles. That is, come up with a few things that I can reasonably assume, and see where that gets me. The introduction can be entirely theoretical, basically saying what I THINK and what I think will come from the rest of the project (which I also get to outline here).

Once that’s done, I need to ground myself in outside theory. So a literature review. There are a lot of fields I intend to dip into (body language, non verbal communication, psychology), some of them much deeper than others (like visual rhetoric or CMC). In this chapter, I’ll probably develop my primary themes, the things that I think are important. A lot of my intention for the introduction will hopefully be borne out in this chapter.

Then we have a methods chapter, where I lay out what I’m going to do in the case studies, why I’m doing it, what I’m looking for, and how I intend to analyze everything.

The point is, I’ve got quite a bit of work I can do before I ever have to really get in to doing the case studies. A lot of very important ground work needs to be laid out, and I need to make sure that I’m just building the platform I need, and not going off on random tangents because I think they’re cool.

It isn’t going to be easy, but what is?

Naturally, my work has suffered from these constant shifts. So much so that I lost sight of what I was doing and started trying to do too much. I was trying to look at a book instead of a sentence.

Let me explain.

When you’re an undergraduate, you look at a field (your major) pretty broadly. Like a whole book, with a number of chapters. It’s still focused, in the sense that it’s one book, but it’s also pretty broad. In graduate school, when you work towards a Master’s Degree, you open up your book and pick one chapter. Your focus narrows and you learn a whole lot about a comparatively small part of your field. There’s still a lot of room to play around, but the barriers are there, and you’re starting to see just how much is actually IN that chapter.

A PhD is when you narrow your focus more, until you’re looking at one of the sentences in that chapter. Just one. You see how much information is packed into one sentence, and you become an expert in that. You become really good at something very small. That’s how it should be.

Instead, I tried writing a prospectus that examined Gender studies, Queer theory, Rhetorical studies, Visual rhetoric, Digital rhetoric, Behavioral Psychology, Communication theory, Identity theory… the list goes on. I was trying to look at the whole book. Maybe even at the whole library.

Needless to say, I’ve thrown out what I had so far. Now I’m trying to focus again. I’m back to my bonzai tree.

Or, if you prefer another analogy: I’ve found that I need to climb a mountain. There’s a path that others have gone on before, and I need to follow that path. I need to meet the Sherpas and become friends with them. I need to decide if any of them are crazy, stupid, or wrong, and I need to decide which ones I like the best. Then, with the help of those sherpas, I’m going to find my own path down the other side of the mountain. Maybe someone else has been there before. Maybe I’ll just be finding a short cut, or pointing out a path. Maybe I’ll be blazing a new one. But what matters is that I learn about THIS mountain, about THESE sherpas.

So that’s what I’m up to now.

And it has me wondering something: Does greater variety beget homogeny? That is, do the additional options for self-presentation (avatars etc) make people LESS likely to be different? Do people become more realistic, or follow the same accepted ‘ideal’ shape and end up with nearly identical avatars?

I don’t know…. but it has me thinking.

That’s both liberating and terrifying. It’s liberating because I am finally able to start on my dissertation. It’s terrifying for exactly the same reason. I have to write a dissertation. This is a book, and a scholarly one.

On a certain level, I have been preparing for this for a long time. I knew as an undergrad that I wanted a PhD. I knew I was going to have to do this. I’ve been collecting advice on the subject ever since. And I’ve been teaching myself to write in a way that would make a dissertation easier for years now. So, for example, I know that I shouldn’t look at it as a single 160 page paper. Instead, I should look at it as 8 papers of 20 pages each (I have 8 chapters planned). Writing a twenty page paper isn’t scary; that’s just a few days of work, along with a few weeks of research.

Lucky me, I have the research already. I’ve been researching and thinking about this topic to the exclusion of all other scholarly work for almost a year now. Since mid October of last year, when I failed my specialty exam, I’ve been focusing on this topic with all of my academic strength. That’s about eleven months of research. Which is great; I have a stack of books and papers that I’ve gone through. I have pages and pages of quotes. I have a bibliography that has more than fifty sources in it.

Unfortunately, that means I don’t really have any excuse NOT to write. So I have to do it. Which means I have to give myself permission to write. I’m told that’s the hardest part: giving yourself permission to write. And I don’t seem to have a choice. Which is good.

Something else I learned is that I am not writing a final draft. I’m not writing a rough draft (I’ve talked about how I hate that term), but I’m not writing a finished product either. Right now, I’m just writing. I’m putting quotes where I can think of them, but I’m also putting in notes to myself (like to FIND a quote). I’m letting it flow out, getting the ideas down on paper (figuratively), but I’m not thinking of this as the final project. While the end result may be 160 pages, I’m expecting to write about five times that (which would be 800 for those of you keeping score). Large chunks of that will be repeated pages, but that’s okay; the idea is to set things down, then go refine them.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’ve got 5 pages of chapter 1 finished at this point. Which means I have 5 out of 800; a little less than 1%. That doesn’t seem like much, but I’ve been doing this now for exactly two days. At this rate, even if I spend as little time every week writing that I have been this week, I’ll be able to write about 8 pages a week. That’s 1% per week. Which means it would take almost two years to finish. But I’m not going to keep that slow of a pace.

For one thing, as I get farther along, I’ll be editing as much as writing, which will rack up ‘fresh’ pages pretty fast. For another, I know myself; I tend to write with a slow pace at first, then increase it almost exponentially, eventually sprinting to the end. I think I can probably safely say that I will do 8 pages this week, but next week I expect to hit 20, then 40 by the end of September. That would 5% in one month, which would mean 20 months… though I don’t expect to stay that slow. I’ve planned out 9 months for myself (starting on 9/20 and hopefully finishing by 6/20).

First, I’ll get it all written out. Then it’s just a matter of expanding, of editing tone, and of rewriting. Maybe I’ll throw it all away and start over at some point. Maybe I’ll do to myself what my adviser and mentor did to me with my Master’s thesis; I’ll look at it, then say to me “this is good, you’re on the right track. Now throw it away and start over.”